Some ETX users have sent me examples of their astrophotography. If you have some examples you would like included here please send me a description of how you made the astrophotos and a copy of the images as GIF or JPEG files (due to internet email gateway issues, please send only one image file per message). Send to etx@me.com. Alternatively, if you have created your own web page with your examples please let me know and I'll include a link to your site. You will also find astrophotography examples on the Helpful Information - Astrophotography page.

Please find 2 images of Saturn taken on the 25th February 06. Taken at F45 and F30.
All other details on the images.

Reprocessed my best Saturn AVI file, this is the best Saturn image I have achieved ! I hope it goes along way to show
new buyers for those that have purchased a ETX125 of what is achieveable in a Town area of the UK with patience
and a good deal of experimention. I love this Scope !

Submitted by: guest planets.bbe [24 Feb 06]

This is an image of Jupiter taken last year on 11th April. It was reprocessed using processing techniques from
Damian Peach who I had the pleasure of meeting last night. As you can see the result is amazing !
The ETX Truly is mighty ......

Not a really good photo of Jupiter, but it appears very low from my site.
Europa and it's shadow transit though is always interesting.

Venus

Submitted by: Stewart Long (Stewart.Long@bcm-ltd.co.uk) [21 Feb 06]

Please find attached an image of Saturn taken from the U.K. on 18.02.06 for consideration for the gallery.
Technical details:ETX125 polar aligned (first time I have tried it-wow what an improvement for imaging stability!), 4x powermate, lpi. About 300 tiffs stacked in Envisage. Colour corrected and wavelets applied in Registax and final tweak in CS2.

Submitted by: C.A.Warburton (C.A.Warburton@lboro.ac.uk) [17 Feb 06]

I took some video of Saturn that I have now processed and thought I'd send you the results.
My scope's an Etx-90ec set up on my home made Equatorial wedge. The video was taken with a toucam 840k set at 320 x 240 with a 2x Apo Barlow and IR filter. The avi was stacked in Registax. The image is a stack of 1854 frames from 2067 and has been resized x2 with further adjustments done with Arcsoft Photostudio.

here is a picure of Saturne. This picture was made of 550 frames processed with Registax.
Equipment: Canon Powershot A-610, Meade ETX-125 with Meade 32mm eyepiece and Antares 2X barlow.

Submitted by: Bruce Pipes (bevnbruce@comcast.net) [14 Feb 06]

Attached are some recent Mars and Saturn pics and a couple of Quicktime movies. I have upgraded my digital camera from a Canon S110 to an Olympus C765. The X10 optical zoom of of the Olympus helps a lot.
The details for the Mars pic and the frames for the movie are the following: The pic was taken on 11/25/05 at about 8 pm EST and the frames for the movie were taken on 11/5/05 between 8 pm and 12:30am EST.
Telescope: ETX-125
Photo method: afocal
Eyepiece: Scopetronix 15mm Plssl
Camera: Olympus C765 in movie mode (640X480 pixels, 15 fps) with X10 optical zoom; attached with Scopetronix Digi-T
Processing: Frames (typically 300 to 450) stacked with Keith's Image Stacker and processed with unsharp mask, wavelet shrinkage denoise and level adjust. Brightness and contrast further adjusted in Photoshop Elements.

Click image to see movie in a new browser window

The details for the Saturn pic and movie are the following: The pic was taken on 2/9/06 about 9:15pm EST and the frames for the movie were take at various times in 2004, 2005 and 2006. The only difference from the above in the settings for the Saturn pic is that the optical zoom was about 7.5.

'An Astronomers Golden Night'
I've spent many nights outside in my garden viewing Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Some were awful because of turbulent air, others average, few really satisfying. When I went outside on February 2nd, 2006 we had some mist and fog in the air and only a bit blinking of the stars - mmh... that looks good for planetary imaging if only the fog would not destroy everything. Two hours later the equipment had cooled down to about 10 degrees below freezing point and the fog still allowed to see brighter stars.
I made 7 avi's this night. One a bit brighter, one a bit darker, one with more color for the planet, one more white for the rings... Each avi gave a final, post-processed image. The final images of each 'session' then were processed to the final-final. A lot of work, but this night was worth it. So here is Saturn with nearly 3000 frames out of more than 8000 (MEADE ETX-125EC, 2x barlow lense, PHILIPS ToUCam pro; K3CCD Tools, PaintShop Pro)

...and enlarged with description of what to see
Cassini going round, colored cloudbelts, the C-ring... I'm really proud of it. But what to do now? Probably I will never be able to do it better with my equipment at my location.

Submitted by: Paul Campbell (iamzoup@yahoo.com) [6 Feb 06]

Here are three photos of Jupiter. They were taken with my etx 125 and a sac 7 ccd camera from my home in Washington Pa. They are all avi's of 60 sec. at 1/25 of a sec. I ran each photo through the wavelet of registax 3. four times. Then I used Imagestacker to combine the photos and then cleaned them up in adobe photoshop.

Please find attached the digital photo of Saturn taken recently. It was taken with the ETX-90EC and 19 better images were stacked with Registax then later slightly touched up with Adobe Photoshop. Good weather for a change (at the time) and next time I hope to use the LPI or SAC IV imager.

Please find enlosed images from my ETX125. Not my best work and its amazing how the seeing can affect
your images. Still, won't moan just nice to get some work in and some clear(ish) nights.
Seeing 21st - 5/10
Seeing 22nd - 6/10
Seeing (4 Jupiter) 4/10
All Other details on image.

Venus after inferior conjunction. Some extension of the cusps is visible. Unfortunately, seeing was not good and the crescent appears thicker than it really was.
The phase was 1.63%.

Submitted by: Dieter.Wolf@DNSint.com [20 Jan 06]

as Mars no longer is an attractive object and Jupiter still far away in morning skies I started this years planetary imaging with Saturn.
Bye the way, James, great picture of Saturn you posted early this year!
This time I tried a new way of getting the final image.
I 'shot' three avi's, stacked and optimized each one of them into a single image and added these images as layers into a final one.
You don't win details by doing so - quite the contrary - Cassini division even lost a bit of contrast, but it looks nicer (smoother, more uniform and less grainy)
I even could enlarge it a bit.
A lot of work, but I think it's worth it.
2006-01-12 ETX-125EC, 2x barlow, 200 of 900 & 600 of 1250 & 1000 of 1900 frames; north up
Have to get used to that smaller view of the ring system.

Submitted by: Dmytro Abraimov (abraimov@cae.wisc.edu) [20 Jan 06]

Close to Mars opposition I was capturing on CCD Web camera using my Meade EXT 125 with apo 2X.
Here are is GIF animation of Mars consisting of 7 different images captured on October 21 from 1:23 a.m. till 1:48 a.m. (US Central time zone) - about 23 minutes. Each JPEG image was generated from about 300 raw using Registax, finished in Adobe Photoshop 7.0 and then composed by free GIF Microsoft animator.

Here is another GIF animation of Mars. Data for this animation were captured by
ToUcam PRO II 840 K and Meade EXT 125 with apo 2X on October 28, 2005 in
Madison, WI from 12:25 a.m. till 3:55 a.m. USA Central time. Each of 50 images
was stacked from about 60 sec (10 image/sec) AVI movie in RegiStax 2. Images
were finished, aligned manually and captions added in Adobe Photoshop 7.0. The
UTC in captions was taken about in the middle of each short AVI movies. GIF
movie was assembled in Microsoft GIF animator.
Focusing with cold fingers was a great problem, the rest was almost fun.

Submitted by: Job Geheniau (geheniau@xs4all.nl) [20 Jan 06]

Took a photo of Saturn. Now I could make a gif animation of the rings of
Saturn over 3 years.

For the first time the dark side of Venus is captured with a 5" scope, which of course is ETX!
(P.S. Christophe Pellier who is the first amateur to capture the night side of Venus from earth and Frank Melillo of the APLO were very enthusiastic about this!)

Submitted by: Carleton Gotlieb (gotliebc@msn.com) [4 Jan 06]

Happy New Year and sorry for all the high clouds we've been having lately in Arizona that shortened your stay in Oracle.
Here is a belated, unprocessed photo (A2.jpg) of Mars taken with a 3.2 megapixel Canon A75 digital camera positioned at the eyepiece of my ETX-125PE/UHTC. You can see Syrtis Major and surrounding dark areas and a hint of the north polar hood. It is the best I took over several nights and approaches what was seen with my eye.
Details: 12/9/05 4:26 UT. 8mm Radian eyepiece with polarizing filter. Camera mounted to camera tripod and positioned close to eyepiece. Optical zoom at 100%, 1/10 second at F4.8, 2 sec. shutter delay, superfine resolution (2048 x 1536).

Please find images of Saturn / Jupiter taken on 27th December 05. Seeing was nothing special
as previous Saturn images show. Cloudy weather since this date. Happy New Year to you and
all the ETX Astrophotographers !